The Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign in the HaFo SaFo district between Silver Lake and Echo Park is the Los Angeles landmark most likely to inspire its own cult (there are also rumors that one of the keys to "getting" Los Angeles is duct-taped inside its spinning mechanism, but that's neither here nor there). Now the movement is ready to finally break out of the eastishside with a new website from Machine Project's Bennett Williamson that shows a 3D model of the sign constantly constantly spinning, so that anyone with internet access can live by its rulings and/or do its bidding. (Legend is the sign is an oracle--if you see the sad foot first, there's a bad day coming--and it's also used as a sort of coin flip.)
Williamson writes that "For now it can help those outside of the greater Silverlake / Echo Park neighborhood with their fate prediction needs, and spin in memory of all the great, chintzy, vernacular forgotten L.A. signs that have gone the way of the bulldozer."
The Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign already has devotees in Beck, who used to stay in or go out depending on the sign's mood, and in Jonathan Lethem and the late David Foster Wallace, both of whom wrote the sign and its powers into their novels (You Don't Love Me Yet and The Pale King, respectively). We recommend you join them in pledging fidelity; you're probably not going to have a choice much longer anyway.
· sunsetfootclinicsign.com [Official Site]
· David Foster Wallace Cements Happy/Sad Foot Sign as Icon, Oracle [Curbed LA]
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